The jogger had his own phone out. The retired man in the cardigan was shouting into his. The woman with the golden retriever had tied the leash to the maple tree with fumbling fingers and stood with both fists pressed to her mouth, making a sound like a kettle about to boil.
Thirty seconds.
Near the porch steps, the growing pool of water reached Naomi's legal folder. The ceramic coffee mug that had weighted it down tipped and rolled, and the folder slid open, and pages lifted and floated across the drowned grass like pale leaves. Oral argument outlines. Draft opinions with her neat marginal notes. Sealed memoranda she had been reviewing for a hearing downtown. The ink began to bleed immediately, black lines softening and spreading through the wet paper, her morning's work dissolving into the lawn in front of everyone.
Daniel tried again. He threw himself at Holt's side and wrapped both arms around the older man's torso and pulled with everything he had, boots skidding in the mud. "Holt! Ryan! Enough!"
For one heartbeat Daniel thought it might work. Holt's aim wavered. The stream jerked sideways and chewed a trench through the rose bed, flinging petals and mulch into the air.
Then Holt drove his elbow back hard into Daniel's ribs.
Daniel grunted and let go and went down on one knee in the mud, one hand pressed to his side, and through the ringing in his ears he heard Holt shouting, though the words barely registered anymore, something about respect, something about learning, the same script men like Holt always read from when the audience was watching and pride was on the line.
Naomi had stopped trying to shield her face. Her arm had fallen to her side, too heavy to lift, and she lay curled in the ruined rose bed with water streaming from her hair and her chin, coughing in great wracking spasms whenever she tried to draw breath. Her blouse was transparent with water. Mud caked her forearms. A flattened rose, absurdly intact, rested against her cheek like a kiss.
Evelyn had stopped recording. The phone hung forgotten in her hand as she leaned over the porch railing, both arms stretched toward Naomi as if she could pull her across twenty feet of lawn by will alone. "Naomi, sweetheart, hold on," she called, her voice breaking on the last word. "Hold on, help is coming." The retired man had given up on his phone and was hurrying across the street with the clumsy haste of a man whose knees had not run in a decade, shouting for Holt to stop as if volume alone could end it. The jogger had sprinted for the corner, yelling for someone to call an ambulance. And Naomi, curled in the mud with the stream still hammering her shoulder, felt her strength going out of her in waves. Her arms had gone numb. Her jaw ached from clenching. A strange gray flickered at the edges of her vision, and she thought, with the odd detachment of a mind protecting itself, that she had read about this in case files, the way the body folded inward when it could no longer fight, and she refused, she absolutely refused, to let it happen on this lawn.
Forty seconds.
Evelyn was sobbing openly now. "Please," she begged the empty air, the neighbors, God, anyone. "Please, she can't breathe, please."
And then, at forty five seconds, Holt's thumb eased off the trigger.
The stream died with a sputter. The hose went limp in his hands. The roar cut off so suddenly that the absence of it felt like a second assault, a vacuum where violence had been.
Holt stood over the wreckage of the lawn, chest heaving, water dripping from the nozzle onto his boots, and for a moment he looked almost surprised to find himself there, as if some other man had done this and he had only just arrived to see the result.
Chapter Nineteen
The Silence After the Water Stopped
The silence was almost as violent as the spray.
It settled over Ashbury Lane in a single heavy instant, broken only by Naomi's coughing and the drip of water from the maple leaves and Evelyn's ragged sobbing from the porch next door. Nobody spoke. The teenager had lowered his phone to chest height but kept it recording. The jogger stood with his own phone forgotten in his hand. Even the golden retriever had gone quiet, pressed flat against its owner's legs.
Naomi lay on her side in the soaked grass and tried to breathe.
Each breath came in pieces. She coughed hard, doubling over, water streaming from her hair and her chin and the tip of her nose. Her blouse clung to her skin, cold and heavy. Her gardening gloves were gone, lost somewhere in the mud. Her scarf lay twisted a few feet away, trampled and filthy, unrecognizable as the thing she had tied around her curls that morning with such ordinary care.